Co. Wexford remained the storm centre of the rebellion. In the hardest-fought battle of the insurrection, the United Irishmen had been repulsed at Arklow on 9 June. From several directions, columns of regular troops, militia and yeomen closed in, the largest being led by General Gerard Lake, the commander-in-chief.
Rebel atrocity marked the final stages. Dragged from the prisons of Wexford town, loyalists in a ghastly ritual were cruelly slaughtered. Each prisoner was made to kneel on the bridge spanning the River Slaney, and there they were piked to death. Ninety-seven prisoners were butchered, some left bleeding to death on the bridge, and others having their bodies hurled down into the river. Then the pikemen were called away—they were needed to defend Vinegar Hill.
The Wexford insurgents had made their main camp on a hill just outside the town of Enniscorthy: Vinegar Hill. General Lake rejected all suggestions from fellow-officers that he should attempt to impose a surrender—he wanted a great military victory. Twenty thousand rebels, almost all armed only with pikes, massed on the hill. The outcome could not be in doubt. Lake had 10,000 troops and twenty pieces of artillery, together with 400 requisitioned coaches loaded with ammunition and equipment. For four days his forces encircled the hill, and at 7 a.m. on the morning of the fifth day, 21 June, his heavy guns opened up. For an hour the pikemen withstood the hail of grapeshot and the new exploding shells fired by Lake’s howitzers.
Then the rebel army broke, the cavalry advanced, cutting down retreating insurgents in their hundreds, and, after capturing a rebel hospital in Enniscorthy, the crown forces set fire to it with all the patients still inside. Following the recovery of Wexford town, courts martial meted out the death sentence to scores of ‘Croppies’—so named because the United Irishmen had cropped their hair short in the French revolutionary fashion.
When I was marching o’er Wexford Hill
O! who could blame me to cry my fill?
I looked behind me and I looked before
But my tender mother I ne’er saw more.
When I was mounted on the gallows high,
My aged father he was standing by;
My aged father he did me deny,
And the name he gave me was the Croppy Boy.
One of the last to be executed in Ulster was Henry Joy McCracken. His sister Mary Ann had bought him a passage to America and sent him tools and clothes so that he could disguise himself as a carpenter. But a former customer recognised him as he crossed the green at Carrickfergus. He was arrested and put on trial in Ann Street in Belfast, where the crown attorney offered him his life if he would name his co-conspirators; but he refused, whispering to his sister: ‘You must be prepared for my conviction.’ On 17 July he was taken to the Market House on the corner of High Street and Cornmarket, the ground for which had been given to Belfast by his great-great-grandfather. Then, Mary Ann recalled,
I took his arm and we walked to the place of execution.... Harry begged I should go. Clasping my arms around him (I did not weep till then), I said I could bear any thing but leaving him.... Fearing any further refusal would disturb the last moments of my dearest brother, I suffered myself to be led away.
Though Michael Dwyer still held out with a small band of dedicated followers in the Wicklow Mountains, the rebellion effectively was over.
Or was it? On 23 August 1798 three frigates sailed into Killala Bay in a remote corner of north Co. Mayo. The French had come.
Episode 159
THE RACES OF CASTLEBAR
O the French are on the sea, says the Shan Van Vocht,
O the French are on the sea, says the Shan Van Vocht,
O the French are in the bay ...
On 22 August 1798 the French were indeed in the bay, Killala Bay. Here in remote north Mayo General Jean Humbert, with 1,099 men, disembarked from three frigates and began to distribute leaflets to local people who had come to stare at them:
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Union! Irishmen ... After several unsuccessful attempts, behold Frenchmen arrived amongst you.... The moment of breaking your chains is arrived.... Union! Liberty! The Irish Republic!—Such is our shout. Let us march!
Erin’s sons be not faint-hearted,
Welcome, sing then Ça ira;
From Killala they are marching,
To the tune of Vive la.
Many Mayo men joined the French, though a proclamation written in English meant nothing to these Irish-speakers. Few had even heard of the United Irishmen, and some were sure the French had been sent by the pope. One French officer declared:
God help these simpletons. If they knew how little we care for the pope or his religion, they would not be so hot in expecting help from us: we have just sent away Mr Pope from Italy, and who knows we may find him again in this country.
Meanwhile the newly appointed viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, led a great army out of Dublin and sent an advance party of 3,000 troops aboard a fleet of barges on the Grand Canal to take them westwards.
Humbert, after taking Ballina, took his men twenty-five miles south by a narrow bridle track skirting Nephin mountain. He headed for Castlebar, where at an hour before midnight on 26 August General Gerard Lake took command. Then, at 7 a.m. in the morning of 27 August, Humbert found himself faced by formidable opposition: a front line manned by the Kilkenny Militia, commanded by the Marquis of Ormond, and the Royal Irish Artillery with four curricle guns; a second line of Fraser Fencibles from the Highlands, with two cannon, and a corps of Galway Yeomen; a third line consisting of four companies of Longford Militia commanded by Lord Granard; and, in reserve, squadrons of carabineers and Lord Roden’s Foxhunters.
With only one small cannon and his Irish allies fleeing after the first shot, Humbert ordered his grenadiers to charge with fixed bayonets. Outgunned and greatly outnumbered, the French nevertheless overwhelmed the first two lines. The militia threw down their arms and scattered. Lord Ormond ‘begged and beseeched’ his men to rally, but in vain, and he finally broke down in tears. The flight of the crown forces had been so precipitate that the battle ever after was known as the ‘Races of Castlebar’.
The victorious Humbert held a victory ball in Castlebar and proclaimed a Republic of Connacht. But few of the local Irish joined him. He fought his way north-west, intent on reaching Ulster (which he mistakenly thought was still in rebellion), until he reached Drumahair in Co. Leitrim. There he heard that the Defenders and United Irishmen of the counties of Westmeath and Longford had risen in revolt. He rushed to join them. By now, however, the government forces had become so formidable that defeat was inevitable. On 8 September 1798 at Ballinamuck, Co. Longford, the French and their Irish allies made a last stand. Humbert and his men surrendered. They were treated courteously. The Irish who had joined the French suffered terrible retribution.
Humbert knew that two more French expeditions were due to sail. They were too late. On 16 September a French corvette sailed into Rutland harbour in Co. Donegal. The veteran United Irishman Napper Tandy stepped ashore, only to find, remarkably, that the local postmaster was his old friend. The postmaster assured Tandy that the rebellion was over. The two men shared several bottles, and French officers carried Napper Tandy, unconscious with drink, back on board and sailed away.
A much larger French expedition, made up of ten ships of the line under the command of Admiral Jean-Baptiste Bompart, reached Lough Swilly in north Donegal on 12 October. But the Royal Navy, directed by Sir John Warren, was already there. During a violent storm, in perhaps the greatest sea battle ever fought in Irish waters, the French were overcome. Seven French ships struck their colours, and one of the first to step ashore from the captured flagship at Buncrana was the United Irish leader, Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Taken in chains to Dublin, Wolfe Tone faced a military court in the Royal Barracks on Saturday 10 November 1798. He was allowed to read out a long statement. He began:
It is not my intention to give the court any trouble. I admit the charge against me in the fullest extent; what I have done, I
have done, and I am prepared to stand the consequences.
Episode 160
THE UNION PROPOSED
The great object of my life has been the independence of my country; for that I have sacrificed every thing that is most dear to man.... Whatever I have said, written, or thought on the subject of Ireland I now reiterate: looking upon the connexion with England to have been her bane I have endeavoured by every means in my power to break that connexion.... I have failed in the attempt; my life is in consequence forfeited and I submit; the court will do their duty and I shall endeavour to do mine.
With these words Theobald Wolfe Tone ended his address to a military court in Dublin on 10 November 1798. Denied his request to be shot by firing-squad as a soldier, instead of being hanged as a traitor, he cut his throat. His partly severed windpipe was sewn up in the hope that he could still be hanged, but after a week he died. He was buried in the family plot at Bodenstown, Co. Kildare.
At least 20,000 men, women and children had met with violent deaths during the great Irish rebellion of 1798. Most of them were from poor farming and labouring families. Few had any real understanding of what the United Irishmen meant by an Irish republic. They had fought against the crown for a bewilderingly wide range of motives: hunger for land; revenge; adventure; sectarian hatred; and a desire to be rid of high rents, taxes and tithes.
Wolfe Tone had plotted to sever Ireland’s connection with England. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, on the other hand, was determined to bind the island ever more closely to Britain. For Pitt the last straw was the inability of the Ascendancy—the Protestant gentry and nobility of Ireland—to maintain law and order at a time when the Empire was in peril.
On 28 May 1798, only days after the start of the rebellion, Pitt wrote formally to the Irish viceroy, to inform him that he intended to press forward with a bill to unite the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland under one legislature at Westminster. Pitt’s main concern was Britain’s safety during a deadly war with revolutionary France. So far in this conflict, Britain had suffered a string of catastrophic defeats. French expeditions to Ireland had shown how vulnerable Britain’s western flank could be. But Pitt also was certain that a union of the two kingdoms would bring prosperity and contentment to Ireland. Ireland would no longer be a colony but a partner with Britain—perhaps a junior partner, but a partner nevertheless.
Absolutely central to Pitt’s scheme was the emancipation of the Catholics. Penal legislation passed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had largely been repealed. In fact there were only two significant penal laws left by 1798: Catholics were still excluded from certain senior public positions; and Catholics could not be members of parliament. Pitt was convinced that the stability of Ireland depended on bringing in from the cold the Catholics with education and money. Get rid of the last Penal Laws—emancipate them—and Catholics could then become part of the governing elite. He planned to include Catholic Emancipation in his Union Bill.
Since 1782 Westminster could not make laws to bind the kingdom of Ireland. So a union of the two kingdoms had, in effect, to be a treaty, approved by both parliaments. The Prime Minister knew that he could count on Westminster MPs to agree with him that Ireland could be more safely ruled from London rather than from Dublin. He hoped that the Irish Protestant Ascendancy—badly frightened by the rebellion—would also take this view.
Pitt and his cabinet colleagues completely underestimated the difficulty of persuading the Irish parliament to vote itself out of existence. For a start, some members of the Irish government, loyal supporters of Pitt until now, vehemently opposed a union. Others, including the Lord Chancellor—‘Black Jack’ Fitzgibbon, the Earl of Clare—made it plain that they would support a Union bill only if it did not include Catholic Emancipation. Lord Clare said that he would not help to create a ‘popish democracy’. Since King George III then very forcefully declared himself opposed to further concessions to Catholics, Pitt—with a heavy heart—dropped Catholic Emancipation from his bill. The viceroy of Ireland, Lord Cornwallis, was bitterly disappointed. He wrote: ‘I certainly wish that England could now make a union with the Irish nation, instead of making it with a party in Ireland.’
In October 1798 a senior public servant in Dublin Castle, Under-Secretary Edward Cooke, wrote to William Pitt to warn him that a Union bill might well be lost in the Irish parliament. It would be necessary, Cooke added, to have the Union ‘written-up, spoken-up, intrigued-up, drunk-up, sung-up and bribed-up’.
So, indeed, it proved.
Episode 161
‘JOBBING WITH THE MOST CORRUPT PEOPLE UNDER HEAVEN’
On 22 January 1799 the public galleries of the Irish House of Commons were packed. This was the first opportunity the Irish parliament had to express its opinion on the government’s proposal to unite Britain and Ireland under one parliament at Westminster. Feelings ran high. The debate lasted for twenty-one uninterrupted hours. No fewer than eighty MPs addressed the House. Tempers flared. One government supporter reported to London: ‘You would have thought you were in a Polish diet. Direct treason spoken, resistance to law declared, encouraged and recommended.’
Abuse was heaped by the opposition on Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, whose job it was as Chief Secretary to recommend the Union Bill. William Plunkett, after denouncing Castlereagh as ‘a green and sapless twig’ (because he had failed to father children), then declared:
For my part I will resist it to the last gasp of my existence and with the last drop of my blood. And when I feel the hour of my dissolution approaching, I will, like the father of Hannibal, take my children to the altar and swear them to eternal hostility against the invaders of their country’s freedom.
When it came to a division at dawn on 23 January, the government defeated the opposition by a single vote. This was not enough to ensure the enactment of such a momentous measure. Exceptional effort would have to be put in to win a comfortable parliamentary majority in the final vote.
A pamphlet warfare raged. At least 248 pamphlets penned during these months on the subject of the proposed union survive. Titles included:
Irish salvation promulged, or The effects of an union with Great Britain candidly investigated in an evening’s conversation between a farmer and a schoolmaster
Alarum to the people of Great Britain, and Ireland; in answer to a late proposal for uniting these kingdoms. Shewing the fatal consequences of such an union
Keep up your spirits, or Huzza for the empire!! Being a fair, argumentative defence of an union addressed to the people of Ireland. By a citizen of the Isle of Man
The wedding and bedding, or John Bull and his bride, fast asleep, a satirical poem containing an history of the happy pair from their infancy to the present period, with reasons for and means used to accomplish their union; also The matchmakers, with their rueful lamentation on the loss of the bride-cake
For the next year the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Cornwallis, and his Chief Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, used every means in their power to win over a parliamentary majority for the Union. Castlereagh announced that the government would compensate every borough-owner—that is, every man who controlled a town or village returning members to the Irish parliament. Each would receive the very generous compensation payment of £15,000 per borough. Above all, the government made lavish promises of ‘places’ and ‘pensions’—that is, of well-paid government jobs for MPs and their relatives, and annual payments to be made by the crown. Some MPs were raised to the peerage or promoted, for example from a baronage to an earldom. In a few cases direct money bribes were made. The viceroy wrote in despair: ‘My occupation is now of the most unpleasant nature, negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under Heaven.... I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work.’
This lavish use of what was then called ‘patronage’ may not have been ethical, but, strictly speaking, it was not illegal. What we now know, however, is that the Prime Minister, William Pitt, did
in desperation resort to illegality: he used Secret Service funds, unauthorised, to pay for bribes and propaganda. Melodramatically, he sent Castlereagh £5,000 in Bank of England notes all cut in half and sent to Ireland by two separate messengers ... and, of course, in those days Castlereagh would not have had Sellotape to stick them back together again. In all, a total of £32,556 6s 11d was sent to buy support in various ways for the Union Bill in Ireland. This was entirely illegal, and most of Pitt’s fellow cabinet ministers were kept in the dark about it.
To keep up the morale of its supporters, Dublin Castle gave a lavish dinner every day for twenty or thirty members, who could then be rushed to the debating chamber when urgently required. As the alcohol flowed freely, Sir Jonah Barrington recalled, Under-Secretary Edward Cooke ‘with significant nods, and smirking innuendoes began to circulate his official rewards to the company [until] every man became in a prosperous state of official pregnancy ... fully resolved to eat drink, speak, and fight for Lord Castlereagh’.
By the beginning of 1800 it was becoming clear that Castlereagh would get the large majority he needed.
Episode 162
THE PASSING OF THE ACT OF UNION
When the Irish House of Commons met on 15 January 1800, the Chief Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, again put forward a resolution to bring about the unification of Great Britain and Ireland under a single parliament at Westminster. In a packed House, a furious debate ensued. Sir Boyle Roche spoke in support of the bill. This colourful MP had once famously asked: ‘Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?’ Now he said: ‘Sir, there is no Levitical decree between nations, and on this occasion I can see neither sin nor shame in marrying our own sister.’ Another MP, John Egan, announced his opposition to the Union, and speaking in defence of retaining the Irish parliament, he declared: ‘It would be the glory of my life to spill the last drop of blood I have in my veins.’ Egan, a bankrupt barrister, had refused an offer of a well-paid post as governor of Kilmainham Jail if he would support the bill. Now, overcome by emotion or too much claret, he bellowed across the floor: ‘Ireland—Ireland forever! And damn Kilmainham!’
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Page 44
